Dowd, Kristof, Friedman and Rich

MoDo asks “Is She a Trojan Rabbit?” and if Hillary Clinton were to become Barack Obama’s vice president, would she take the back seat or would she just always be plotting, draining him of his magical powers?  Mr. Kristof writes about “Saving the World in Study Hall,” and says Bill Gates may have the spotlight for his philanthropic work, but high school pupils and even younger children are driving a trend toward piggy-bank philanthropy.  Mr. Friedman tells you to “Call Your Mother,” and that much of the outlook that infuses his own writings was bred into him from his mom, who believed that even if pessimists were usually right, optimists were behind great changes.  Mr. Rich tells us to “Party Like It’s 2008,” and that almost every wrong prediction about this election has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars.  Here’s MoDo:

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana slide, that she has a broader base, citing an Associated Press article “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

It is, verily, a sticky wicket.

One top Hillary supporter who is black warns that, despite the giddy dreams of some punch-drunk Democrats, a fusion ticket could backfire because “Americans can’t handle too much change at once.”

But should Obama ignore that caution and appease Hillary fans by putting her on the ticket?

As president, he could announce that, because Dick Cheney abused the powers of his office so grievously, taking the title “Vice” literally, he intends to shrink the vice presidency back to its “bucket of warm spit” Constitutional prerogatives — presiding over the Senate and taking over if the president goes under anesthesia.

He might also neglect to give Bill (whose acronym would be SLOTUS, Second Lad of the United States) full White House access.

Aside from the delight Bill would get from living at the Naval Observatory and having a huge telescope to window-peep with, there wouldn’t be much joy in Hillaryland.

The lady-in-waiting would be surrounded by Obama disciples who disdained her for fighting dirty. And she would be miserable holding up the train of the young prince who usurped her dream, derailing the post-nup she had with Bill to trade places.

As de facto veep for Bill, she had enough leverage over him, due to his shenanigans, to co-opt huge chunks of policy and personnel decisions.

But in a return engagement with Obama at the top, could she really wake up every day in the back seat and wish him well, or would she just be plotting? (Fourteen vice presidents have ascended, after all.) Wouldn’t she be, in Monty Python parlance, the Trojan Rabbit behind the gates?

On a positive note, maybe she could bring back all that stuff she pilfered on her way out.

Obama’s other option, laid out by Teddy Kennedy on Friday, is to go with someone who wouldn’t be a big dark cloud over his sunshiny new politics.

Teddy told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt that Obama should choose a partner “in tune with his appeal for the nobler aspirations of the American people.”

That would be smart for another reason: Hillary has a strange, unnerving effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he’s unable to do his best. Probably, it’s because she’s furious, always shaking his hand off her arm, ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden One is not used to such rough treatment.

In the last few days, as Hillary has deflated and Obama and the Democrats have dashed for daylight, he has been more like his old self, flashing his all-is-right-with-the-world smile on the cover of Time, joshing and charming Democrats and Republicans as he wooed superdelegates on the House floor, taking on James Carville for insulting his manhood.

“James Carville is well known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about,” he told Terry Moran on “Nightline.”

Obama will never be at his best around Hillary; she drains him of his magical powers. She’s Jane Jinx to him. It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in “Pat and Mike.”

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, “You are the wrong jockey for this chick.”

“You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,” he says, later adding, “When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?”

The best way Obama can punish Hillary is to reward himself. He’s no good around her, see?

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Teenagers are supposed to be sullen and self-absorbed, but Rachel S. Rosenfeld never got the memo.

Rachel is a high school junior in Harrison, N.Y., who came down with a painful intestinal ailment that forced her to miss the entire 2006-7 school year. So she resolved that if she couldn’t go to school herself, she could at least help other kids who wanted to.

From her sickbed, Rachel sold T-shirts and solicited contributions to build a 316-student elementary school in rural Cambodia. Borrowing an idea from university fund-raising, she offered naming opportunities: for $25, donors could buy chairs to be named for them. All told, she raised $57,000, which was channeled through an aid group, American Assistance for Cambodia.

Now Rachel is mostly healthy again and back in school, but over the December vacation she traveled to Cambodia to cut the ribbon at the R. S. Rosenfeld School.

“The children were all so grateful and well-behaved,” Rachel said. “It truly was a life-changing experience.”

College students used to be the activists, but increasingly they’re joined by high school pupils and even younger children. The spotlight may be on billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, but one of the country’s healthier trends has been the rise of piggy-bank philanthropists.

Two high school students in Massachusetts, Ana Slavin and Nick Anderson, started a nationwide high school campaign, Dollars for Darfur, that has raised $420,000 for the people of Darfur from 440 schools.

The humanitarian prodigies like Ana and Nick are laudable for going beyond simple protesting to help their causes. Today’s young social entrepreneurs come across as more constructive than my generation of student activists, and more savvy about how to accomplish their goals cost-effectively.

Senator Chris Dodd has pushed for a requirement of 100 hours of public service in high school. There’s a risk that a mandate undermines the virtue, but on balance I’m in favor. Colleges should also emulate Princeton and encourage young people to take a “gap year” of public service abroad (I list a few possibilities for a gap year and for student activism on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground).

Climate change has particularly galvanized high school students — perhaps because it’s their world that we’re cooking. A 16-year-old in San Francisco, Taylor Francis, has been speaking to groups around the country about global warming; after some training by Al Gore, he has set up his own Web site and is heading to China in June to give a dozen lectures there.

“There’s an enormous outpouring of young people who are trying to do community service,” Taylor said. “Unfortunately, a lot of that is probably just to get into college.”

These days, even some elementary children are getting involved. More than 2.5 million children participated in a drive on Club Penguin, a children’s activities Web site, that directed $1 million to charity.

In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, I should be wringing my hands about adolescents these days, so lazy and degenerate compared with my own upstanding generation. But when I see high school students working energetically to save the lives of people half a world away, before they are even allowed to buy a beer, I’m reduced to mumbling admiration. These kids are truly inspiring.

As a 16-year-old in Melbourne, Fla., Allyson Brown organized a Valentine’s dance at her high school, with the proceeds going to fight malaria in Africa. That dance grew into Stayin’ Alive, a campaign that has attracted more than 100 schools in 31 states to raise money to buy mosquito bed nets that cost $10 each and protect a family from malaria.

The aim of Stayin’ Alive, which is run by a group called Malaria No More, is to buy enough bed nets to protect two million children. Allyson, who remains very involved in the program, will have saved more lives as a student than many doctors save in a lifetime.

It’s true that some of the activism may have less to do with humanitarianism than with college applications. But even when greedy, self-absorbed cynics take on some worthy cause for the most selfish motives, they often learn and grow from the experience.

“I’ve seen some people who just want to bump up their résumés,” Allyson acknowledged. But she said that most participation seemed heartfelt — including that of a girl, about 7 years old, who ran a lemonade stand to buy bed nets for African kids.

“A lot of people say that teenagers aren’t thinking about the greater good,” Allyson added, just a hint of protest in her voice. “But when you give teens a chance to help, and they know their contributions will make a difference, then they help a lot.”

So maybe it’s time that we all learn from our juniors.

Here’s Mr. Friedman:

The ad popped up in my e-mail the way it always has: “1-800-Flowers: Mother’s Day Madness — 30 Tulips + FREE vase for just $39.99!”

I almost clicked on it, forgetting for a moment that those services would not be needed this year. My mother, Margaret Friedman, died last month at the age of 89, and so this is my first Mother’s Day without a mom.

As columnists, we appear before you twice a week on these pages as simple bylines, but, yes, even columnists have mothers. And in my case, much of the outlook that infuses my own writings was bred into me from my mom. So, for once in 13 years, I’d like to share a little bit about her.

My mom was gripped by dementia for much of the last decade, but she never lost the generous “Minnesota nice” demeanor that characterized her in her better days. As my childhood friend Brad Lehrman said to me at her funeral: “She put the mensch in dementia.”

My mom’s life spanned an incredible period. She was born in 1918, just at the close of World War I. She grew up in the Depression, enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, served her country in World War II, bought our first house with a G.I. loan and lived long enough to play bridge on the Internet with someone in Siberia.

For most of my childhood, my mom appeared to be a typical suburban housewife of her generation, although I knew she was anything but typical. She sewed many of my sisters’ clothes, including both of their wedding dresses, and boy’s suits for me. And on the side, she won several national bridge tournaments.

My mom left two indelible marks on me. The first was to never settle for the cards you’re dealt. My dad died suddenly when I was 19. My mom worked for a couple of years. But in 1975, I got a scholarship to go to graduate school in Britain and my mom surprised us all one day by announcing that she was going, too. I called it the “Jewish Mother Junior Year Abroad Program.”

Most of her friends were shocked that she wasn’t just going to play widow. Instead, she sold our house in little St. Louis Park, Minn., and moved to London. But what was most amazing to watch was how she used her world-class bridge skills to build new friendships, including with one couple who flew her to Paris for a bridge game. Yes, our little Margie off to Paris to play bridge. She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.

The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too.

My mom’s other big influence on me you can read between the lines of virtually every column — and that is a sense of optimism. She was the most uncynical person in the world. I don’t recall her ever uttering a word of cynicism. She was not naïve. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.

Six years ago, I was in Israel at a dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which publishes my column in Hebrew. I asked the editor why the newspaper ran my column, and he joked: “Tom, you’re the only optimist we have.” An Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, was seated next to me and as we walked to the table, he said: “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist. It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”

Well, the truth is, I am not that short. But my mom was. And she, indeed, could only see that part of the glass that was half full. Read me, read my mom.

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

Another weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted “game changers” that collapsed in the locker room.

Hillary Clinton’s attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’, economist-bashin’ populist went bust: Asked which candidate most “shares your values,” voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton’s small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba bonhomie, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false expectations for her disastrous showing in North Carolina. Barack Obama’s final, undercaffeinated debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable path to the Democratic nomination.

“It’s still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it’s way too late for her, she’s half-right. We’re only at the end of the beginning of this extraordinary election year. While we wait out her self-immolating exit, it’s a good time to pause the 24/7 roller coaster for a second and get our bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense.

This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.

Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.

As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry’s against President Bush in 2004.

But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.

A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.

Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.

Collins and Herbert

La Collins writes about a “Mother’s Day Scandal,” and says the people of Staten Island seemed prepared to forgive Vito Fossella for the drunken driving, but the second family threw them for a loop.  Mr. Herbert’s column is titled “Seeds of Destruction,” and he says the Clintons should be ashamed of themselves for deliberately trying to wreck the presidential prospects of their party’s likely nominee.  Here’s La Collins:

By now we voters are well-versed in how to respond when, say, your law-and-order governor turns out to be a primo patron of the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. Escort Service. But the bar moves ever upward, and this week, New Yorkers are trying to figure out the proper reaction to news that a veteran local congressman, Vito Fossella, is the proud paterfamilias of both a household in Staten Island (wife, three children) and a love nest with mistress and child in Virginia.

Looking back, I think we might have begun to wonder why it was that although Fossella has been in Congress for more than 10 years, he did not seem to have a Washington address. Really, that’s a little long to crash with friends.

Fossella has embarked on a series of mea culpas, beginning with a drunken driving incident that set the whole crisis in motion. “As a parent, I know that taking even one drink of alcohol before getting behind the wheel of a car is wrong,” he said. This was actually one of those nonapology apologies, since “taking even one drink” does not have much relationship to attaining a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit.

His adventures began last week with a White House party to celebrate the New York Giants’ Super Bowl victory. (Although that triumph feels as if it occurred six years ago, the Bush administration was a little slow in taking note.) The congressman continued partying. He was arrested in Alexandria, Va., around midnight after going through a red light and failing the recite-the-alphabet test. (Fossella appeared to have trouble deciding exactly where “H” goes.)

He told the police officer that he was on his way to take his daughter to the hospital, which did not seem like a good plan from the daughter’s perspective. Then he summoned a friend, in the form of Laura Fay, a retired Air Force officer who plunked down $2,500 to spring the man who, we would discover, was the father of her child and a familiar sight to the neighbors of her nearby home.

The people of Staten Island seemed prepared to forgive Fossella for the drunken driving, but the second family threw them for a loop. This is interesting given the fact that the D.U.I. is the only illegal part of the story. Also, while it’s hard to imagine that a love child or two poses any actual threat to a congressman’s constituents, the same cannot be said about having a local lawmaker who is prepared to get behind the wheel of a car when he’s too drunk to remember the rule about not mentioning the daughter in Alexandria to authority figures brandishing pencil and pad.

Although Fossella has never been exactly a legislative lion, his political fate takes on additional interest because he is the only Republican among New York City’s Congressional delegation and the seat, as we like to say, is now in play. “Mr. Fossella is going to have some decisions to make over the weekend,” said the House minority leader, John Boehner.

As The Washington Post noted, this was on the same day that House Republicans moved to reconsider a unanimous vote commemorating Mother’s Day. It all had something to do with a procedural rebellion, but I think we can file that under the extremely large category of Unfortunate Republican Ideas.

Fossella is not the first modern-era congressman to have been caught in this particular pickle. In the 1976, Robert Leggett, a Democrat from California, confessed that he had been supporting a girlfriend and two children in Washington along with his hometown family. Leggett also admitted that he had forged his California wife’s name on the deed to a house he bought for Family 2, and that he had also been conducting an affair with an aide to Speaker Carl Albert. Said aide had just been granted immunity in a corruption investigation, and The Post reported the whole story under the headline: “Life of Immense Complications.”

Leggett was re-elected that November, proving once again that if you are going to go in for this sort of thing, your first step should really be to vote liberal. Unfortunately for Fossella, he is a social conservative who has been very supportive of attempts to post the Ten Commandments in public places.

Fossella is not even the only New York politician ever to develop a love child problem. The State Capitol in Albany, in fact, sometimes seems to be awash in them. And, of course, back in 1884, Grover Cleveland almost lost his election for president when Buffalo newspapers came up with an alcoholic sales clerk with an illegitimate son and placed the baby on Cleveland’s doorstep.

In reality, said child was very possibly the offspring of Cleveland’s late law partner, Oscar Folsom. Cleveland, a middle-aged bachelor, kept quiet because he wanted to shield Folsom’s daughter, a beautiful college student who he would marry after he became president. I always felt this would make a great movie were it not for the fact that Cleveland was a rather large balding 51-year-old with a walrus moustache and teeny eyes.

Fossella is much more attractive. Somebody at Lifetime must be working on the script.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

The last time the Clintons had to make a big exit was at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president — and they made a complete and utter hash of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you might have thought the Clintons would be on their best behavior.

Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.

Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.

Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.

Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.

Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”

It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.

So class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo typed a thing called “The Conservative Revival.”  He says it used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way.  Mr. Krugman is “Thinking About November,” and he says that Barack Obama has an extraordinary opportunity in this year’s election. He should do everything possible to avoid squandering it.  Here’s Bobo:

For years, American and British politics were in sync. Reagan came in roughly the same time as Thatcher, and Clinton’s Third Way approach mirrored Blair’s. But the British conservatives never had a Gingrich revolution in the 1990s or the Bush victories thereafter. They got their losing in early, and, in the wilderness, they rethought modern conservatism while their American counterparts were clinging to power.

Today, British conservatives are on the way up, while American conservatives are on the way down. British conservatives have moved beyond Thatcherism, while American conservatives pine for another Reagan. The British Conservative Party enjoyed a series of stunning victories in local elections last week, while polls show American voters thoroughly rejecting the Republican brand.

The flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way.

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”

That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: “The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.” In another speech, he argued: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.”

This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility. Danny Kruger, a special adviser to Cameron, wrote a much-discussed pamphlet, “On Fraternity.” These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.

They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As such, the Conservative Party has spent a lot of time thinking about how government should connect with citizens. Basically, everything should be smaller, decentralized and interactive. They want a greater variety of schools, with local and parental control. They want to reverse the trend toward big central hospitals. Health care, Cameron says, is as much about regular long-term care as major surgery, and patients should have the power to construct relationships with caretakers, pharmacists and local facilities.

Cameron also believes government should help social entrepreneurs scale up their activities without burdening them with excessive oversight.

This focus means that Conservatives talk not only about war and G.D.P., but also the softer stuff. There’s been more emphasis on environmental issues, civility, assimilation and the moral climate. Cameron has spent an enormous amount of time talking about marriage, families and children.

Some of his ideas would not sit well with American conservatives. He wants to create 4,200 more health visitors, who would come into the homes of new parents and help them manage day-to-day stress. But he also talks about rewriting the tax code to make it more family friendly, making child care more accessible, and making the streets safer.

Some of this is famously gauzy, and Cameron is often disdained as a mere charmer. But politically it works. The Tory modernization project has produced stunning support in London, the southern suburbs, the Welsh heartlands and the ailing north. It’s not only that voters are tired of Labor. The Conservatives have successfully “decontaminated” their brand. They’re offering something in tune with the times.

Cameron describes a new global movement, with rising center-right parties in Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, California and New York (he admires Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg). American conservatives won’t simply import this model. But there’s a lot to learn from it. The only question is whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.

Bobo, our Republicans are beyond learning anything.  They want W’s third term, for heaven’s sake.  They should wander in the wilderness forever.  Here’s Mr. Krugman:

The fight for the Democratic nomination seems to be winding down. It’s not completely over, but the odds now overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama.

Assuming that Mr. Obama is the nominee, he’ll lead a party that, judging by the usual indicators, should be poised for an easy victory — perhaps even a landslide.

Yet Democrats are worried. Are those worries justified?

Before I try to answer that question, let’s talk about those indicators.

Political scientists, by and large, believe that what happens on the campaign trail, while it gives talking heads something to talk about, is more or less irrelevant to what happens on Election Day. Instead, they place their faith in statistical analyses that identify three main determinants of presidential voting.

First, votes are affected by the state of the economy — mainly economic performance in the year or so preceding the election.

Second, the approval rating of the current president strongly affects his party’s ability to hold power.

Third, the electorate seems to suffer from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.

This year, all of these factors strongly favor the Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed this favorable a political environment since 1964. Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, tells me: “It would be difficult to find any serious indicator that does not point to a Democratic victory in 2008.”

What about polls that still seem to give John McCain a good chance of winning? Pay no attention, say the experts: general election polls this early tell you almost nothing about what will happen in November. Remember 1992: as late as June, Gallup put Ross Perot in first place, Bill Clinton in third.

There’s just one thing that should give Democrats pause — but it’s a big one: the fight for the nomination has divided the party along class and race lines in a way that I believe is unprecedented, at least in modern times.

Ironically, much of Mr. Obama’s initial appeal was the hope that he could transcend these divisions. At first, voting patterns seemed consistent with this hope. In February, for example, he received the support of half of Virginia’s white voters as well as that of a huge majority of African-Americans.

But this week, Mr. Obama, while continuing to win huge African-American majorities, lost North Carolina whites by 23 points, Indiana whites by 22 points. Mr. Obama’s white support continues to be concentrated among the highly educated; there was little in Tuesday’s results to suggest that his problems with working-class whites have significantly diminished.

Discussions of how and why Mr. Obama’s support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: different observers see very different truths. But at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it was. What does matter is that Mr. Obama appears to have won the nomination with a deep but narrow base consisting of African-Americans and highly educated whites. And now he needs to bring Democrats who opposed him back into the fold.

It’s possible that this will happen automatically — that bad feelings from the nomination fight will fade away of their own accord. In recent decades, Democrats have had little trouble unifying after hard-fought primary campaigns.

But this time the division seems to go deeper than ordinary political rivalry. The closest parallel I can think of is the bitter intraparty struggles of the 1920s, which pitted urban, often Catholic Democrats against Protestant farmers.

So what can be done to heal the party’s current divisions?

More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal.

Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance.

After the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, airily dismissed concerns about working-class whites, saying that they have “gone to the Republican nominee for many elections.” On Tuesday night, Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist, declared that “we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics.” That sort of thing has to stop.

One thing the Democrats definitely need to do is give delegates from Florida and Michigan — representatives of citizens who voted in good faith, and whose support the party may well need this November — seats at the convention.

And to the extent that campaigning matters, Mr. Obama should center his campaign on economic issues that matter to working-class families, whatever their race.

The point is that Mr. Obama has an extraordinary opportunity in this year’s election. He should do everything possible to avoid squandering it.

Collins and Kristof

La Collins writes about “The Torch en Route,” and asks if anyone has noticed how much the presidential campaign and the Olympics are starting to resemble one another.  Mr. Kristof writes about “The Too-Long Goodbye,” and asks if Hillary Clinton should soldier on if continued campaigning is 10 times more likely to benefit John McCain than herself.  Here’s La Collins:

It’s been a while since we last gave thought to the Olympic torch. Where is the little guy these days, anyway? Still getting good hotel rooms?

The torch came to mind Tuesday night as the Democratic primary election returns came rolling in. Has anyone else noticed how much the presidential campaign and the Olympics are starting to resemble one another? Triumphant march toward the big summer party turns into an endless race through conflicts in increasingly remote places. (Last heard, by the way, the torch was sitting atop Mount Everest.)

Meanwhile, the fiesta ambience gives way to sullen muttering about calling the whole thing off.

“Hillary, of course, will make the decision as to if and when she ends her campaign. But I hope that she reaches that decision soon,” said the former Senator George McGovern on Wednesday. McGovern is 85, and was an early Clinton supporter. These days, he represents her most loyal demographic: extremely old people. One of the flaws in the theory that Hillaryites will stay home in November rather than vote for Barack is that many of her staunchest backers are elderly voters, who tend to be such knee-jerk good citizens that they would drag themselves to the polls even if the only candidates on the ballot were Lindsay Lohan and Ryan Seacrest.

You may have heard, by the way, that residents of Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, all in their 80s and 90s, showed up to vote Tuesday and were turned away because of Indiana’s strict new voter ID laws. The laws are supposed to keep people from voting under assumed names, and while nobody seems able to demonstrate that ever really happens, they are demonstrably good at protecting the public from a 98-year-old ballot-wielding nun.

But we digress.

The question on everyone’s lips currently is whether Hillary will quit now that her chances of winning the nomination are extremely remote. Some people felt her speech on Tuesday night in Indianapolis sounded as though it were from a woman who was preparing to throw in the towel. They presumably tuned in after she opened with: “Thanks to you, it’s full speed on to the White House.”

Privately, she says she does not intend to go home and tell Chelsea that she’s a quitter, and this is a side of her that even many Clinton-haters have really come to appreciate. After this campaign, nobody in America can ever seriously argue that women aren’t capable of being in armed combat. She is strong. She is invincible. Or, at minimum, extremely hard to discourage.

“It’s still early,” she said brightly on Wednesday, to the inevitable questions about her plans. Clinton was paying a surprise visit to a college in West Virginia, which holds its primary next week.

West Virginia is very excited about having its day in the sun, and that in itself is a good reason to keep the whole show running. We wring our hands over Florida and Michigan’s votes not counting, but what about the people who haven’t even had a chance to go through the motions? Why should West Virginia be left out of the show? Or Kentucky and Oregon (May 20) or Montana and South Dakota (June 3)?

“We’ve just been absolutely crazy about this,” said Rick Hauffe, the executive director of the South Dakota Democratic Party. “We thought — it actually paid off. The last shall be first.” The state party was buzzing about Hillary’s plans to fly into Sioux Falls on Thursday, hold a rally in an airplane hangar, and fly off again. That might not sound like a big deal if you live in Iowa or New Hampshire. But this is a state that’s still talking about the time that Gary Hart was running for president and actually got off the tarmac and sat on the airport grass for a photo-op.

South Dakota wants its turn. It wants to have Chelsea visit its community colleges and refuse to answer questions about Monica Lewinsky. It wants to have Bill demonstrate his humility by visiting Badger and Peever and Ferney and Tea while Hillary and Barack show up for a state party fund-raiser that would, for the first time ever, actually raise some funds. “Montana had a huge dinner a while back, and there were 6,500 people for an event that usually got 400,” said Hauffe wistfully. “It just hasn’t rained in South Dakota.”

There’s no reason this can’t go on for a while longer. Hillary — who’s taken to mentioning her Web site address as often as the star of an infomercial — seems prepared, if necessary, to pay with her own money for the privilege of making 10 speeches a day, sleeping four hours a night and answering the same questions over and over again. Barack looks so tired that he seems ready to topple, but if you want to be the most powerful elected official on the planet, you ought to be able to outlast a 60-year-old woman.

Grab that torch and head for Rapid City.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

After the Tuesday primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton now has maybe a 2 percent chance of winning the Democratic nomination. But if she pursues her losing battle, she has perhaps a 20 percent chance of costing the Democrats the presidency in the fall.

So should she soldier on if continued campaigning is 10 times more likely to benefit John McCain than herself?

My percentages are, of course, wild estimates, but they suggest the orders of magnitude. With Mrs. Clinton trailing by 700,000 votes in the cumulative popular vote, and also behind in pledged delegates and number of states won, she just doesn’t have a plausible route to the nomination. Even if you include Florida, she’s more than 400,000 votes behind.

In contrast, Mrs. Clinton does have a plausible route to winning the election for Mr. McCain.

The most terrifying numbers for Democrats in Tuesday’s exit polls should be those showing how many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are planning to vote for Mr. McCain in November.

In Indiana, only 49 percent of Clinton voters said they would cast votes for Mr. Obama in November if he were the nominee; in North Carolina, the figure was 47 percent. In both states, a majority of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said that they would either vote for Mr. McCain or stay home.

Ron Wyden, a senator from Oregon who is uncommitted as a superdelegate, is among those who take the more optimistic view that the contest will end in June, that tempers will cool and that voters will come together long before the general election.

“I don’t buy this theory that the other’s supporters will walk in the fall — not when the choices are so stark,” he said.

It’s true that most of Senator Clinton’s supporters presumably will flinch if they contemplate a McCain Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. But the longer this primary warfare continues, the less time to heal the intraparty antagonisms.

In 9 of the last 10 elections, the nominee chosen first has ended up winning the general election.

Suppose that 80 percent of people who voted for Mrs. Clinton in the primaries end up supporting Mr. Obama in November, but that 20 percent stay home or vote Republican. That 20 percent would amount to far more popular votes than Ralph Nader won in 2000.

One worrying parallel for Democrats is the 1980 election, when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter’s re-election and continued until August of that year. “I have a real chance to win,” Senator Kennedy declared on Aug. 9, long after he his chances had utterly evaporated, and he claimed that the clash would be good for the eventual nominee.

Mr. Carter probably would have lost anyway to Ronald Reagan, but it didn’t help that his own party was fractured and demoralized by the endless challenge from Mr. Kennedy.

The upshot is that Mr. Obama’s election prospects in November may depend on Mrs. Clinton. If she stops the attacks and withdraws gracefully — perhaps after winning West Virginia next week — and then she and Bill Clinton campaign for Mr. Obama, then that will boost his prospects. But that’s not the scenario that Mrs. Clinton is signaling.

“I’m staying in this race until there is a nominee,” Mrs. Clinton declared on Wednesday. If the battle continues all the way up to the convention in August, the chaos over delegates from Florida and Michigan will complicate the Democrats’ chances of winning both states. In that case, Mrs. Clinton may be remembered as the spoiler of 2008.

That would be partly the fault of the uncommitted superdelegates. Their fence-sitting is dragging out the contest and undermining their party’s chances in the fall.

One of the reasons that Mrs. Clinton is resolved to keep fighting is, I think, a resentment that she and many of her followers feel over sexism in the campaign. On that issue, she has a point. One of the political lessons of this year — backed by psychological research and polling data — is that the bar is probably higher for a woman candidate for president than for a black candidate.

It’s interesting that two strong women — Katie Couric as well as Mrs. Clinton — have foundered this year in roles that are stereotypically male. Granted, the presidency is very different from the job of an evening news anchor, but some psychology experiments suggests that one factor in each case may be public resistance to a woman in a position in which we are accustomed to seeing a man. One of Mrs. Clinton’s legacies will be that she will make it easier for the next woman candidate.

So Mrs. Clinton’s frustration is understandable. But if it leads to the election of a president whose views and values are antithetical to everything her career has stood for, that would be inexcusable.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo says “Butterflies Aren’t Free,” and asks a question:  Hillary Clinton is so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?  Mr. Friedman writes about “The Democratic Recession,” and says that we need to do everything possible to develop alternatives to oil to weaken the petro-dictators.  Here’s MoDo:

In his memoir, the legendary Elia Kazan wrote about directing Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” While he did not think that Leigh was a great natural actress, he was impressed that she would crawl through glass to get the role right.

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right.

She showed again with her squeaker win in Indiana that for many white working-class men, she is The Man — more tenacious and less concerned with the judgments of the tony set, economists and editorial writers. Talking up guns, going to the Auto Racing Hall of Fame, speaking from the back of pickup trucks and doing shots of populism with a cynicism chaser, Hillary emerged from a lifetime of government limos to bask as queen of the blue-collar prom.

Nobility is for losers.

Just as Obama spent his youth trying not to be threatening, so as not to unnerve whites, Hillary spent her life learning to be threatening so she could beat back challenges to her and her husband — from Republicans and from “bimbo eruptions” and now from a charmed younger rival.

As Obama learned to accommodate, the accommodating Hillary learned to triangulate and lacerate. As he learned that following the rules could get you far with adoring mentors, she learned from Bill and Dick Morris and Mark Penn that following the rules was for saps.

Hillary is less Blanche than Scarlett. “Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you,” Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver. Tom Edsall reported on The Huffington Post that the Hillaryites will try, at a May 31 meeting of the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee, to renege on their word and get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. Addressing supporters here, she urged the counting of the Florida and Michigan votes, noting “it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states.”

“It’s full speed onto the White House,” she said.

Fox News reports that the Clintons are planning a summer campaign with TV appearances, fliers and rallies, between the end of the primary and the convention, to drag back superdelegates trying to flock to Obama. The Democratic race has been a scorpion and a butterfly in a bottle. Hillary tore Barry’s wings off, and so psyched him out with her silly goading — “Enough about the speeches and the big rallies!” she cried — that he gave up his magical trump cards.

Wandering around Indiana, appearing in neighborhoods and at diners without any advance notice, talking to handfuls of people, Obama strived to seem less lofty and more mortal. Hounded by Hillary, Bill and Rev. Wright, he just looked sort of numb. When Obama went to an 11:30 p.m. shift change at an auto components plant here, a Newsday reporter on the scene noted that many of the white men “were less likely to smile or look him in the eye or seem impressed with him.”

In a restaurant in Greenwood on Tuesday, Obama approached an older white guy who waved him off, muttering afterwards to a reporter: “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”

Even though people at diners kept trying to fatten up Obama — he drew the line at gravy — he looked increasingly diaphanous, like anti-matter to Hillary’s matter. She’s more appealing when she’s beaten down; he’s less imposing. Even his strategists admit that he will now need to “step it up,” as one said. And he did that with his victory speech in Raleigh, N.C., with a vivid paean to patriotism and “telling the truth forcefully, repeatedly, confidently.” As one aide crowed, “He’s back!”

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

Here’s Mr. Friedman:

There are two important recessions going on in the world today. One has gotten enormous attention. It’s the economic recession in America. But it will eventually pass, and the world will not be much worse for the wear. The other has gotten no attention. It’s called “the democratic recession,” and if it isn’t reversed, it will change the world for a long time.

The term “democratic recession” was coined by Larry Diamond, a Stanford University political scientist, in his new book “The Spirit of Democracy.” And the numbers tell the story. At the end of last year, Freedom House, which tracks democratic trends and elections around the globe, noted that 2007 was by far the worst year for freedom in the world since the end of the cold war. Almost four times as many states — 38 — declined in their freedom scores as improved — 10.

What explains this? A big part of this reversal is being driven by the rise of petro-authoritarianism. I’ve long argued that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse correlation — which I call: “The First Law of Petro-Politics.” As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.

“There are 23 countries in the world that derive at least 60 percent of their exports from oil and gas and not a single one is a real democracy,” explains Diamond. “Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Nigeria are the poster children” for this trend, where leaders grab the oil tap to ensconce themselves in power.

But while oil is critical in blunting the democratic wave, it is not the only factor. The decline of U.S. influence and moral authority has also taken a toll. The Bush democracy-building effort in Iraq has been so botched, both by us and Iraqis, that America’s ability and willingness to promote democracy elsewhere has been damaged. The torture scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay also have not helped. “There has been an enormous squandering of American soft power, and hard power, in recent years,” said Diamond, who worked in Iraq as a democracy specialist.

The bad guys know it and are taking advantage. And one place you see that most is in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has been trying to steal an election, after years of driving his country into a ditch. I would say there is no more disgusting leader in the world today than Mugabe. The only one who rivals him is his neighbor and chief enabler and protector, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki.

Zimbabwe went to the polls on March 29, and the government released the results only last week. Mugabe apparently decided that he couldn’t claim victory, since there was too much evidence to the contrary. So his government said that the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, had won 47.9 percent of the vote and Mugabe 42.3 percent. But since no one got 50 percent of the vote, under Zimbabwe law, there must now be a runoff.

Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change claim to have won 50.3 percent of the vote and have to decide whether or not to take part in the runoff, which will be violent. Opposition figures have already been targeted by a state-led campaign of attacks and intimidation.

If South Africa’s Mbeki had withdrawn his economic and political support for Mugabe’s government, Mugabe would have had to have resigned a long time ago. But Mbeki feels no loyalty to suffering Zimbabweans. His only loyalty is to his fellow anti-colonial crony, Mugabe. What was that anti-colonial movement for? So an African leader could enslave his people instead of a European one?

What Mugabe has done to his country is one of the most grotesque acts of misgovernance ever. Inflation is so rampant that Zimbabweans have to carry their currency — if they have any —around in bags. Store shelves are bare; farming has virtually collapsed; crime by people just starving for food is rampant; and the electric grid can’t keep the lights on.

What can the U.S. do? In Zimbabwe, we need to work with decent African leaders like Zambia’s Levy Mwanawasa to bring pressure for a peaceful transition. And with our Western allies, we should threaten to take Mugabe’s clique to the International Criminal Court in The Hague — just as we did Serbia’s leaders — if they continue to subvert the election.

But we also need to do everything possible to develop alternatives to oil to weaken the petro-dictators. That’s another reason the John McCain-Hillary Clinton proposal to lift the federal gasoline tax for the summer — so Americans can drive more and keep the price of gasoline up — is not a harmless little giveaway. It’s not the end of civilization, either.

It’s just another little nail in the coffin of democracy around the world.

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo typed about “Combat and Composure,” and says Barack Obama is instinctively a conversationalist and community-mobilizer. Hillary Clinton, as she says, will fight and fight.  I can’t wait until he discovers that there’s a Republican who wants to be president too…  Maybe he’ll find out that he has a vicious temper.  Mr. Herbert says people are “Doing the Troops Wrong,” and suggests we might be surprised at who is not supporting the effort to pay for college for G.I.’s who have willingly put their lives on the line.  Oh, I remember, it’s that Republican that Bobo never talks about…  Here’s that tool Bobo:

Life is short, but campaigns are long. And during the course of them, each candidate will have impressive and pathetic moments. But underlying the highs and lows, there are the fundamentals. The fundamentals of the Obama-Clinton race were on display Sunday morning.

Hillary Clinton went on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” incarnating her role as the first Democratic Rambo. The Clinton campaign seems to want to reduce the entire race to one element: the supposed masculinity gap. And so everything she does is all about assertion, combat and Alpha dog dominance.

A few questions in, Clinton rose from her chair and loomed over Stephanopoulos. The country hasn’t seen such a brazen display of attempted middle-aged physical intimidation since Al Gore took a walkabout on the debate stage with George Bush. It was like watching someone get elbowed in a dark alley by their homeroom teacher.

But her attempt to take over the show was nothing compared with her attempt to dominate the truth. For the first 30 minutes, she did not utter a single candid word, including, as Mary McCarthy would say, “and” and “the.”

She peddled her sham gas-tax holiday and repeated her attempt to blame Indiana’s job losses on outsourcing and Nafta. Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Paul Krugman, a Times columnist, has raised doubts about the plan, Clinton lumped Krugman in with the Bush administration and said she wasn’t going to listen to the people responsible for the last seven years.

This wasn’t just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn’t going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader — helping one’s own.

Barack Obama gave off an entirely different vibe on “Meet the Press.” His campaign has been in the doldrums for the past few months. He’s never come up with an explanation about how he would actually transform politics, and his conventional substance is beginning to overshadow his unconventional style.

But, as Sunday’s contrast made clear, Obama still seems like a human being. He still seems to return each night to some zone of normalcy where personal reflection lives. He wasn’t fully candid when answering questions about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but there are some inner guardrails that prevent the spin from drifting too far from the truth. Thoughtful and conversational, he doesn’t seem to possess the trait that Clinton has: automatically assuming that critics are always wrong.

Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria. His astounding composure has come across as weakness in the midst of combat with Clinton, but it’s also at the core of his promise to change politics. He vows to calm hatred and heal division.

This contrast between combat and composure defines the Democratic race. The implicit Clinton argument is that politics is an inherently nasty business. Human nature, as she said Sunday, means that progress comes only through conquest. You’d better elect a leader who can intimidate. You’d better elect someone who has given herself permission to be brutal.

Obama’s campaign grows out of the longstanding reform tradition. His implicit argument is that politics doesn’t have to be this way. Dishonesty and brutality aren’t inevitable; they’re what gets in the way. Obama’s friend and supporter Cass Sunstein described the Obama ideal in The New Republic: “Obama believes that real change usually requires consensus, learning and accommodation.”

That’s regarded as naïve drivel in parts of Camp Clinton.

Campaign issues come and go, but this is a thread running through the race. One believes in the raw assertion of power, the other the power of communication.

They are imperfect messengers for their creeds. Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. Obama talks about postpartisan compromise in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

Still, amid the storms of the presidency, their basic worldviews would shape their presidencies. Obama is instinctively a conversationalist and community-mobilizer. Clinton, as she says, will fight and fight. If elected, she’ll have the power to take the Hobbesian struggle she perceives, and turn it into remorseless reality.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

At the top of the list of no-brainers in Washington should be Senator Jim Webb’s proposed expansion of education benefits for the men and women who have served in the armed forces since Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s awfully hard to make the case that these young people who have sacrificed so much don’t deserve a shot at a better future once their wartime service has ended.

Senator Webb, a Virginia Democrat, has been the guiding force behind this legislation, which has been dubbed the new G.I. bill. The measure is decidedly bipartisan. Mr. Webb’s principal co-sponsors include Republican Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia, and Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.

(All four senators are veterans of wartime service — Senators Webb and Hagel in Vietnam, Warner in World War II and Korea and Lautenberg in World War II.)

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are on board, as are Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House.

Who wouldn’t support an effort to pay for college for G.I.’s who have willingly suited up and put their lives on the line, who in many cases have served multiple tours in combat zones and in some cases have been wounded?

We did it for those who served in World War II. Why not now?

Well, you might be surprised at who is not supporting this effort. The Bush administration opposes it, and so does Senator John McCain.

Reinvigorating the G.I. bill is one of the best things this nation could do. The original G.I. Bill of Rights, signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, paid the full load of a returning veteran’s education at a college or technical school and provided a monthly stipend. It was an investment that paid astounding dividends. Millions of veterans benefited, and they helped transform the nation. College would no longer be the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and those who crowned themselves the intellectual elite.

As The New York Times wrote on the 50th anniversary of the G.I. bill: “Few laws have done so much for so many.”

“These veterans were able to get a first-class future,” Senator Webb told me in an interview. “But not only that. For every dollar that was spent on the World War II G.I. bill, seven dollars came back in the form of tax remunerations from those who received benefits.”

Senator Lautenberg went to Columbia on the G.I. bill, and Senator Warner to Washington and Lee University and then to law school.

The benefits have not kept pace over the decades with the real costs of attending college. Moreover, service members have to make an out-of-pocket contribution — something over $100 a month during their first year of service — to qualify for the watered-down benefits.

This is not exactly first-class treatment of the nation’s warriors.

The Bush administration opposes the new G.I. bill primarily on the grounds that it is too generous, would be difficult to administer and would adversely affect retention.

This is bogus. The estimated $2.5 billion to $4 billion annual cost of the Webb proposal is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions being spent on the wars we’re asking service members to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s important to keep in mind is that the money that goes to bolstering the education of returning veterans is an investment, in both the lives of the veterans themselves and the future of the nation.

The notion that expanding educational benefits will have a negative effect on retention seems silly. The Webb bill would cover tuition at a rate comparable to the highest tuition at a state school in the state in which the veteran would be enrolled. That kind of solid benefit would draw talented individuals into the military in large numbers.

Senator Webb, a former secretary of the Navy who specialized in manpower issues, said he has seen no evidence that G.I.’s would opt out of the service in significantly higher numbers because of such benefits.

Senator McCain’s office said on Monday that it was following the Pentagon’s lead on this matter, getting guidance from Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Under pressure because of his unwillingness to support Senator Webb’s effort, Senator McCain introduced legislation with substantially fewer co-sponsors last week that expands some educational benefits for G.I.’s, but far less robustly than Senator Webb’s bill.

“It’s not even close to the Webb bill,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group.

Politicians tend to talk very, very big about supporting our men and women in uniform. But time and again — whether it’s about providing armor for their safety or an education for their future — we find that talk to be very, very cheap.

Kristol and Krugman

Little Billy Kristol, who’s never been right about anything in all his born days, speculates about “McCain-Jindal.”  He says some McCain staffers are tempted by the idea of Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, for vice president: he is young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak.  That, of course, depends on whether or not Gov. Jindal wants W hung around his neck like an albatross.  Mr. Krugman says that “Success Breeds Failure,” and that now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit, the pushback against sensible regulation is in full swing.  Here’s that pitiful creep Kristol:

Barack Obama said Friday, “We’ve had a rough couple of weeks.” Actually, he’s had a rough couple of months. He’s lost three big primaries to Hillary Clinton. And, should he hold on to win the nomination, he can no longer be considered a clear favorite over John McCain in the general election.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll in late February, Obama was defeating John McCain 50 to 38. Two months later, the Times/CBS poll had McCain and Obama tied. The poll that came out yesterday showed Obama reopening a lead over McCain — but clearly over this period a vulnerability for Obama was exposed.

And when Obama’s 12-point lead over McCain was evaporating, Hillary Clinton was moving from a tie in February to a five-point advantage — and now that has widened further.

The main reason for Clinton’s strong performance was surely that she didn’t have as her pastor for 20 years the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama has now repudiated Wright because of his remarks at the National Press Club last Monday. But Wright said nothing new there. AIDS could well have been invented by the U.S. government. Sept. 11 was at least in part “chickens coming home to roost.” Louis Farrakhan deserves our respect. These views of Wright were known to Obama when he made his “I can no more disown him” speech in Philadelphia on March 18. Yet, last week, at a press conference in North Carolina, Obama claimed to be “shocked” and “surprised” by what Wright had said, and disowned him.

What really seems to have shocked and surprised Obama is what Wright said about him: “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing.” Later on in his press conference, Obama returned to this, saying that Wright’s cavalier dismissal of Obama as just another politician was “a show of disrespect to me.”

Some voters might think it would have been nice if Obama had been as angry in March at Wright’s disrespect to the United States of America as he was in April at Wright’s disrespect to Barack Obama.

Still, Obama is the likely Democratic nominee. Some conservatives are giddy at the thought — kidding themselves that the general election will therefore be easy, that Obama will be another Dukakis. I was struck, though, in several conversations this week with McCain campaign staffers and advisers that they’re pretty sober about the task ahead. About the Dukakis analogy, for example, one McCain aide said: If in 1988 Ronald Reagan had had a 30 percent job approval rating, and 80 percent of the voters had thought we were on the wrong track, Dukakis would have won.

And the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that on Saturday night Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.

Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.

That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.

Maybe that’s why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak.

It might also be a way to confront the issue of McCain’s age (71), which private polls and focus groups suggest could be a real problem. A Jindal pick would implicitly acknowledge the questions and raise the ante. The message would be: “You want generational change? You can get it with McCain-Jindal — without risking a liberal and inexperienced Obama as commander in chief.” I would add that it was after McCain spent considerable time with Jindal in New Orleans recently, and reportedly found him, as he has before, personally engaging and intellectually impressive, that the campaign’s informal name-dropping of Jindal began.

Of course, we shouldn’t assume that the Democratic nominee will be Obama. Maybe Clinton will win both Indiana and North Carolina on Tuesday. If she does, she’ll have a chance — an outside chance, but a chance — to win the nomination. And if that happens, the reason will have been that Obama allowed his own running mate in the primaries to become Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Now, from the ridiculous to the sublime, here’s Mr. Krugman:

Cross your fingers, knock on wood: it’s possible, though by no means certain, that the worst of the financial crisis is over. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that as markets stabilize, chances for fundamental financial reform may be slipping away. As a result, the next crisis will probably be worse than this one.

Let’s look at the story so far.

After the financial crisis that ushered in the Great Depression, New Deal reformers regulated the banking system, with the goal of protecting the economy from future crises. The new system worked well for half a century.

Eventually, however, Wall Street did an end run around regulation, using complex financial arrangements to put most of the business of banking outside the regulators’ reach. Washington could have revised the rules to cover this new “shadow banking system” — but that would have run counter to the market-worshiping ideology of the times.

Instead, key officials, from Alan Greenspan on down, sang the praises of financial innovation and pooh-poohed warnings about the growing risks.

And then the crisis came. Last August, as investors began to realize the scope of the mortgage mess, confidence in the financial system collapsed.

I believe we’ve been lucky to have Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman during these trying times. He may lack Mr. Greenspan’s talent for impersonating the Wizard of Oz, but he’s an economist who has thought long and hard about both the Great Depression and Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s, and he understands what’s at stake.

Mr. Bernanke recognized, more quickly than others might have, that we were in a situation bearing a family resemblance to the great banking crisis of 1930-31. His first priority, overriding every other concern, had to be preventing a cascade of financial failures that would cripple the economy.

The Fed’s efforts these past nine months remind me of the old TV series “MacGyver,” whose ingenious hero would always get out of difficult situations by assembling clever devices out of household objects and duct tape.

Because the institutions in trouble weren’t called banks, the Fed’s usual tools for dealing with financial trouble, designed for a system centered on traditional banks, were largely useless. So the Fed has cobbled together makeshift arrangements to save the day. There was the TAF and the TSLF (don’t ask), there were credit lines to investment banks, and the whole thing culminated in March’s unprecedented, barely legal Bear Stearns rescue — a rescue not of Bear itself, but of its “counterparties,” those who were on the other side of its financial bets.

It’s still far from certain whether all this improvisation has resolved the crisis. But it was the right thing to do, and for the moment things seem to be calming down.

So two cheers for Mr. Bernanke. Unfortunately, his very success — if he has succeeded — poses another problem: it gives the financial industry a chance to block reform.

We now know that things that aren’t called banks can nonetheless generate banking crises, and that the Fed needs to carry out bank-type rescues on their behalf. It follows that hedge funds, special investment vehicles and so on need bank-type regulation. In particular, they need to be required to have adequate capital.

But while our out-of-control financial system has been bad for the country, it has been very good for wheeler-dealers, who collect huge fees when things seem to be going well, then get to walk away unscathed — indeed, often with large severance packages — when things go wrong. They don’t want regulations that would stabilize the economy but cramp their style.

And now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit, the pushback against sensible regulation is in full swing. Even the Fed’s very modest proposal to curb abusive mortgage lending with new standards is under fire, and there are worrying signs that the Fed may back down.

Maybe a Democratic sweep in November can revive the cause of financial reform, but right now it looks as if we’ll soon return to business as usual.

The parallel that worries me is what happened a decade ago, after the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management failed, temporarily causing the whole financial system to freeze up.

Through luck and skill, that crisis was contained — but rather than serving as a warning, the episode nurtured the false belief that the Fed had all the tools it needed to deal with financial shocks. So nothing was done to remedy the vulnerabilities the L.T.C.M. crisis revealed — the same vulnerabilities that are at the heart of today’s much bigger crisis.

And if we don’t fix the system now, there’s every reason to believe that the next crisis will be bigger still — and that the Fed won’t have enough duct tape to hold things together.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo has a question:  Why does Barack Obama, raised by a single mother who was on food stamps, seem so forced when he mingles with the common folk?  Mr. Friedman asks “Who Will Tell the People,” and says we are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.  Mr. Kristof’s column is titled “A Prison of Shame, and It’s Ours.”  He says it would take an exceptional enemy to damage America’s image and interests as much as President Bush and Dick Cheney already have with Guantánamo.  Mr. Rich talks about “The All-White Elephant in the Room,” and says if we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.  (About damn time somebody addressed that issue…)  Here’s MoDo:

Barack Obama is going to get down if it kills him.

Bleeding white voters in North Carolina and Indiana, the Illinois senator headed Thursday evening to V.F.W. Post 1954 in North Liberty, Ind., consisting of a bar, a pool table, a Coors Light clock and a couple of dozen curious white guys.

Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.

Obama is also doing his best to impress hoop-crazed Hoosiers with his passion for basketball. On Thursday night, in shirt and tie, he took on an eighth grader named Aaron at a backyard picnic in Union Mills in an impromptu game of P-I-G. “You know, he’s tough,” Obama laughed about his 14-year-old opponent. “He’s like Hillary Clinton.”

The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.

Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.

Cherry-bombing the word “pansy” into the discourse, Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina said Hillary made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”

Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Portage, Ind., hailed her “testicular fortitude,” before ripping into “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”

James Carville helpfully told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek that if Hillary gave Obama one of her vehicles of testicular fortitude, “they’d both have two.”

Then came the Big Dog, crazy like a fox, for the coup de graceless. Campaigning in Clarksburg, W. Va., he said that his scrappy wife can win working-class voters, as compared with Obama’s Viognier-and-Volvo set.

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” the former president said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”

Oh, well, at least Bill didn’t use the word uppity. And don’t you love this paean to rules coming from a man so tethered and humbled by rules that he invented an entirely new sexual etiquette to suit his needs in the Oval Office?

Why does Obama, the one with the bumpy background and mixed racial heritage, the one raised by a single mother who was on food stamps, seem so forced when he mingles with the common folk?

Karl Rove and other Republicans say he comes across as the snooty product of a Hawaiian prep school, Cambridge, Columbia and Hyde Park, and that is what led to the damaging anthropological “bitter” disquisition. Yet George H. W. Bush’s attempts to paint over his patrician style with a cowboy veneer was a silly sort of masquerade, obviously engineered by Lee Atwater, who brought the props of pork rinds and country music.

Voters also don’t seem to mind Hillary, with her $109 million bank account, selling herself as the champion of the little people. The blue-collar queen shared her thoughts about the “outrageous” Rev. Wright with the blue-collar king, Bill O’Reilly, last week. In reality, as first lady, Hillary was renowned for her upstairs-downstairs tussles in the White House, and her high-handed treatment of the little people in the travel office, on the switchboard and on the residence staff. The reports were legend about the Clintons’ problems with the Secret Service, and I once saw Bill dress down an agent in a humiliating way over a couple of autograph seekers who got past a rope line in Orange County, Calif.

Obama, on the other hand, may seem esoteric, and sometimes looks haughty or put-upon when he should merely offer that ensorcelling smile. But he is very well liked by his Secret Service agents, and shoots hoops with them. And I watched him take the time one night after a long day of campaigning to stand and take individual pictures with a squadron of Dallas motorcycle police officers on the tarmac.

It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.

“I do think that one of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I are elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types,” he said, adding sincerely, “I filled up my own gas tanks.”

It’s hard not to be who you are, but it’s doubly hard to be who you’ve strived not to be. Obama not only has to figure out how to unwind with a Bud. He has to rewind his life.

Feh.  Here’s Mr. Friedman:

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore … have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

And all W can think of to ask is that we go shopping…  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

My Times colleague Barry Bearak was imprisoned by the brutal regime in Zimbabwe last month. Barry was not beaten, but he was infected with scabies while in a bug-infested jail. He was finally brought before a court after four nights in jail and then released.

Alas, we don’t treat our own inmates in Guantánamo with even that much respect for law. On Thursday, America released Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who had been held without charges for more than six years. Mr. Hajj has credibly alleged that he was beaten, and that he was punished for a hunger strike by having feeding tubes forcibly inserted in his nose and throat without lubricant, so as to rub tissue raw.

“Conditions in Guantánamo are very, very bad,” Mr. Hajj said in a televised interview from his hospital bed in Sudan, adding, “In Guantánamo, you have animals that are called iguanas … that are treated with more humanity.”

Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, said by telephone from the hospital that Mr. Hajj was so frail when he arrived that he had to be carried off the plane and into an ambulance. Guantánamo inmates are not allowed to see their families, so that evening Mr. Hajj met his 7-year-old son, whom he had last seen as a baby.

Reliable information is still scarce about Guantánamo, but increasingly we’re gaining glimpses of life there — and they are painful to read.

Murat Kurnaz, a German citizen of Turkish descent, has just published a memoir of his nearly five years in Guantánamo. He describes prolonged torture that included interruptions by a doctor to ensure that he was well enough for the torture to continue.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, an American woman of Afghan descent who worked as an interpreter, has written a book to be published next month, “My Guantánamo Diary,” that is wrenching to read. She describes a pediatrician who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to help rebuild his country — and was then arrested by Americans, beaten, doused with icy water and paraded around naked. Finally, after three years, officials apparently decided he was innocent and sent him home.

A third powerful new book about Guantánamo, by an American lawyer named Steven Wax, is summed up by its title: “Kafka Comes to America.”

The new material suggests two essential truths about Guantánamo:

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

Second, torture was routine, especially early on. That’s why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

One of the men still in Guantánamo is Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi. He is a Libyan who had been running a bakery in Afghanistan with his Afghan wife. Bounty hunters turned him over to the United States as a terrorism suspect, and he has been in custody for more than six years.

Mr. Ghizzawi was taken before a “combatant status review tribunal,” which ruled unanimously in November 2004 that he was not an “enemy combatant.” One member of the tribunal later scoffed that the supposed evidence against him was “garbage.” But a later tribunal reversed the first one’s finding, and Mr. Ghizzawi is being held indefinitely, though he is unlikely to face trial.

Candace Gorman, a lawyer for Mr. Ghizzawi, says that his health has sharply deteriorated since she first saw him. He is in constant pain from severe liver disease resulting from hepatitis B that first manifested itself in Guantánamo, Ms. Gorman said, adding that he also contracted tuberculosis there.

Worse, a doctor at Guantánamo twice told Mr. Ghizzawi in December that he has H.I.V., she said. Ms. Gorman believes that officials were just trying to torment him.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, denied that any doctor ever told Mr. Ghizzawi that he had H.I.V., or that Mr. Ghizzawi contracted tuberculosis or first suffered from hepatitis while in Guantánamo.

Granted, it can be hard to figure out what version to believe. When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth. No doubt some inmates lie, and some surely are terrorists. But over time — and it’s painful to write this — I’ve found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.

Both Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates have pushed to shut down Guantánamo because it undermines America’s standing and influence. They have been overruled by Dick Cheney and other hard-liners. In reality, it would take an exceptional enemy to damage America’s image and interests as much as President Bush and Mr. Cheney already have with Guantánamo.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

Bored by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”

Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.

This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.

Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.

For all this primary season�